A letter to DC Entertainment from Dennis Barger comics retailer,
Please read, THANK YOU FROM THE CO-PUBLISHERS
Dear Jim and Dan:
Oh, DC Entertainment – Bleeding Cool and some other sites used this artwork with permission by us – the creators. If you are going to use it in the future, please credit Wonderworld Comics, WonderWorldComics, or Robert Bowman.
I’d like to take a moment between calls number 15 and 16 first thing in the morning asking if we have 3D Joker’s Daughter comics to thank you for all your support for DC’s Villains Month. You know, like when you skipped the middle 2,800 miles of the US to have a Road Show Stops and let us know what was going on. Or when you had your sales reps call me and tell me to up my order wasting my time because apparently you knew these would be allocated. Oh, and at the SDCC Diamond Retailers Lunch when you had Bob say he had placed the orders ahead of time and we should increase our orders and that there might be slight allocations. Especially for the time my managers and I sat around for 2 hours strategizing about how many we should order. The best part was when you Dan announced at Boston that there would be allocations before FOC was due. But my favorite time you helped me out was by announcing “The Allocation” totals 5 minutes before you closed on a Friday and that we had to put a strategy in place by Monday to place 2D orders to make up for your failures in production or ordering.
From the time you started to talk about this initiative with us, we knew it would be a half-assed and thrown together venture, but we gave you the benefit of the doubt. We also had very little concerns over ordering and allocations because you kept using the word slight. I fully appreciate you dictating to us what we have to do and how we were incorrect in our frustrations and through every stage of this process pretending like this was a good thing. And while you had bumps along the way, I hope, in the end, after you post record September profits, counting your piles of money from getting retailers to order 133% more of your product then we wanted to. Your assertion “that when it is all done the outcome was positive for all involved” has missed the point entirely.
We, the retailers, are your customers. You have inconvenienced us, you have forced us to do more work to get what we actually wanted from you, you have forced us to give you more money than we wanted to and you have forced me to make decisions that I did not want to make as to who gets them. Funny, your choices to treat us like this have forced us to treat our customers similar to this and they feel the same way I do right now. They wanted the books, they expected us to order them and have them in stock, they didn’t expect to have to go through the extra time of going from shop to shop looking for them, they didn’t expect to have to pay $10 or more from comic shops to get them and unlike you I am sure as hell not going to write them a letter like you just wrote to me, gloating about how much money I made this month off of my customers misery. “We listened to you”, did you? “and have learned from the experience” like you’ve said for the past 2 years?
As we continue to look at ways to excite our customers with comics from publishers that know what they are doing in terms of supplying their distribution chain and invigorate the market of the other 70% of the comic book industry I will try to remember that I actually like both of your skills as creators, but just really think you are piss poor managers of 3/10th of my stores product line.
Villains Month has been one of the most infuriating, disrespectful and unprofessional months I have ever had the misfortune of enduring in the 8 1/2 years I have been a comic retailers and I owe so much of those feelings to our “partnership” with you.
Again, thank you!
Your customer and apparent Partner,
Dennis Barger
Wonderworld Comics
